the i-witnesses

The verdict from Rome

The outcome of the Rome C4D Congress is unclear and vague. Although it provided a common platform for development communication thinkers and practitioners to work together, I’m not convinced the draft recommendations were in any way ground-breaking.

Here are my complaints:

1. The congress (both plenary and other sessions) had little space for dialogue or discussion. This exposed an obvious gap between theory and reality.

2. The tendency of ‘activist participants’ to argue that ICTs are merely a tool – and that this should be reflected in the recommendations – began to grate with some of us. As far as I’m concerned, ICTs are fundamentally about infrastructure and C4D cannot exist without such infrastructure. I guess these people - wherever they come from - take communication ‘tools’ for granted. Here’s a statistic for them to ponder: an African spends 15 per cent of his or her disposable income on communication compared to 3 per cent spent by Europeans.

3. Support was lacking for human rights (in particular Article 19) to be considered as a framework for development communication. I personally found this very disappointing, and another telling sign of how communication for development is removed from political reality.

However, there was one issue that got mentioned in several presentations and finally made it to the draft recommendations: transparency and accountability of non-state actors (meaning civil society organisations, international financial institutions, and international donor and development agencies).

So perhaps, at last, journalists will have somewhere to complain to if the IMF refuses to divulge information. Well done everyone who pushed this recommendation through!

ICTs for better governance: a step too far?!

East Timor’s prime minister, Jose Ramos Horta, told us that his mobile phone number is publicly available for any of his citizens to contact him directly. So he shouldn’t have been too surprised when his phone went off as he touched down in Rome:

“It was someone who wanted me to send the police to his village to solve a problem. I called my police department and issued orders to send some help to that village.”

I think this is a great story. But I guess it might be less feasible for a country like India which has a population of 1.2 billion!

Top-down or bottom-up?

So far the experts I’ve heard have been singing from the same songsheet: it’s all about voices, participation and dialogue, they tell us. But their presentations have something else in common, namely that the speakers take so much time to explain their stance, the audience has virtually no time to engage or ask questions. A top-down approach to extolling the virtues of participation and dialogue – oh, what an irony!

WCCD: time for some clear thinking

I’ve just arrived in Rome to attend the World Congress on Communication for Development. It started on a high note, with promises of a document that the NGO community can use to persuade decision-makers to pay attention to the media and othe communications when implementing development schemes.

It sounds good in theory, but my sense is that the Congress lacks clear thinking in terms of what needs to be achieved and on what level. Recommendations like ‘communications is essential for good governance’ and ‘participation is key to ownership’ are all sounding a bit tired.

If this document is really going to convince decision-makers and international agencies that we need ‘multistakeholder partnerships’ and ‘participatory alliances’, I suggest we step away from the jargon, and re-write the entire thing for non-specialists.

‘Communication for development' on the radar

It's been a hectic few days, partly thanks to preparations for next week's World Congress on Communication for Development. According to the organisers, some 500 policymakers, practitioners and researchers will be descending on Rome to "to share experiences and best practices in this growing field".

Several of us from Panos London are attending. I'll be running a session on what it really means to implement 'communication for development' (C4D) projects in the South, looking in particular at the interplay between politics, profit and poverty.

In many ways the Congress is a positive step forward. After all it's the first time a meeting of this kind has been dedicated to the field.

And it will – I hope – make a case for the role of communication in development, at a time when international funding agencies are tending to equate ‘communication technologies’ with ‘communications’, and thereby neglecting the political dimensions of C4D.

I don’t believe that C4D can work in a political vacuum. Do you?